


The Embrace of the Grave

by Siamesa



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Revenge, Self-Hatred, Unreliable Narrator, Vigilantism, Wolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-11-08 16:31:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11085516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siamesa/pseuds/Siamesa
Summary: "Please," she'd said.Mud on the riverbank, mud on her hands, the red slash across her mother's dead pale throat.  Arya had known, somehow, before they'd even come here.  She'd dreamt of that body, strong jaws pulling it from the river.  White and red and white and red."Please."That was the beginning of the end.-In which Arya remains with the Brotherhood Without Banners.





	The Embrace of the Grave

**Author's Note:**

> You'll hear me howl by the light of the moon  
> That's how you'll know that I'm coming for you  
> Gonna find you alone in the dark of night  
> When the World Ender comes better run for your life
> 
> \- World Ender, Lord Huron, the song that is also the source of the title.

"Please," she'd said.

Mud on the riverbank, mud on her hands, the red slash across her mother's dead pale throat.  Arya had known, somehow, before they'd even come here.  She'd dreamt of that body, strong jaws pulling it from the river.  White and red and white and red.

_"Please."_

Throros had shaken his head, loose skin flapping on his neck.  "Child, no."  He'd reached out a hand to comfort her.  She'd flinched away. 

Mother's hands were cold, so cold.

Sometimes, when she thinks back, it's though she's seeing it from far away.  Herself, a child, small and thin and blackened by mud, clinging to something on the riverbank, dead and cold and white.  Thoros barely visible, wasting away, smelling of smoke.

Beric, in his tattered cape.  The dead man, kneeling over the corpse.  She remembered his bony hand on her shoulder, for just a moment.  He'd leant towards her mother, lank white hair falling around his face.

Thoros had made a sound, barely a sound.  It was the noise Arya had made, waking from her dream, the cry she'd buried into Yoren's chest at Baelor's Sept.

Beric Dondarrion had kissed her mother's lips.  Had fallen down into the mud of the riverbank, something on his dead face like a smile.  And between her hands, Arya had felt cold fingers move.

That was the beginning of it.  That was the beginning of the end.

-

Sometimes, Mother knows who she is.  Those are the bad days.

Mother doesn't remember everything.  She remembers that she had children, she remembers Father, and she remembers that they are dead, all dead.  The wound at her throat does not heal, and her voice is only raw whispers, but when she speaks it is of Robb, bleeding out from a traitor's dagger, Robb, trying to stand.  Sansa lost in King's Landing.  All her dead babes, her little ones, Bran and Rickon and Arya.  And Arya.

Arya, with her scruffy hair, a bandit girl in truth with no home to return to, is not the daughter who Mother remembers.  But sometimes she sees.

Sometimes she holds her, in her still-cold arms, rocks her to some lullaby they both only half-remember.  Sometimes she turns her back, hides in the trees, the tents, the depths of the hill, and refuses to let Arya come near her.

The pattern repeats, again and again, as the Brotherhood learns to orient themselves around a new leader.

"She remembers," Thoros tells her, and Arya smudges dirt across her face in her haste to wipe the tears away.  "She should not have risen, child, and she knows it.  It would be better for you both, if you were at the Inn."

"No!"  Arya jumps back.  "No!"  Mother is here.  Mother remembers.   Mother can be _healed,_ she can, or what is his Red God good for?  Arya ran, in King's Landing, and she has been running every day since.  But she will not leave her mother.  She will not let him take her back to stay with the _children,_ with Gendry, "my lady, m'lady."

Some days, Arya is just another dusty face, another too-thin boy with too-old eyes.

Those are easier days, at least.

-

She dreams, every night.  She dreams that she is a wolf.

The wolf mourns, too, mourns its littermates, mourns for its den, where they all piled together, bellies full, their mother curled great and warm and _safe_ around them.  The wolf runs, with the little grey shadows around it, and it howls its grief to the skies.

Arya awakens early, to the sound of that distant song.  Anguy, with shadows ever deeper at his eyes, is stringing his bow.

But today they do not hunt wolves.

Today they hunt Freys.

_-_

Arya watches.

Three men.  None broke their necks in the fall, and they all danced and writhed and twisted in the air.  Two are dead now, and one is not.  Arya watches his bound hands twitch.  The air stinks of sweat and piss.

They had begged.  The one on the left, who died second, had said he wasn't at the wedding, and the other two had screamed that they weren't even Frey men, but if they weren't Frey men they were sellswords, and there was little love and no mercy here for either.

They'd died like cowards.

This one, here, as his fingers finally still.  A coward.

Arya's list is very long, these days.  She wonders how many of them will lie and beg, how many will fight, how many will walk to their deaths like her father had, before Yoren had turned her away -

She shuts her eyes, tightly, until the prickle of tears recedes, and looks up into the Frey man's swelling face. She stays there, still and silent, until the faces are barely human, and the flies begin to buzz.  She watches.

The sunset comes early.  The bodies are not bodies now, but shadows.  Still she watches.  She stands, back straight like a lord, like a water dancer, until Ned Dayne comes, to offer her stew and remind her, as her stomach rumbles, that she is still alive, and human.

-

"Some of the men want to leave," he tells her.

Arya glares at him.  "Why?"  She knows why.  She wants to know if he'll say it, or if he'll lie.

"They don't like the hangings."  He meets her eyes, steadily.  "They don't like your - the Lady."  Less steady, now.  "They think she's lost her way."

It's a Lady's answer, a Sansa answer.  Polite.  Smoothing over the rough places.

Arya has never been a lady.  She will never be a lady, even if she wanted to be, any more than she will ever be the Sword of the Morning or a direwolf.  She does not know _what_ she will be, does not even really know what she _is._

But she knows that she will never leave her mother.

"Are you going with them?" she asks.

He looks down into the fire.  "No."  He looks up, and there are shadows around his eyes, too, the same as Anguy.  "Not unless you are."

Arya bristles.  "I'm not your lady love."

"No," he says.  "But you're... you're my friend.  And I'll protect you, Lady Arya.  I swear it."  He looks, suddenly, to be trying to get from a cross-legged sit into a kneel.

Arya forestalls him with a grip to his wrist, a warrior's grip.  A warrior's oath.

She makes her own vow, silently, to her mother's gods and her father's.  To protect her mother.  To protect her grandfather's people, Ned Dayne, the children, Gendry.  To see her family avenged.

She barely catches his next whisper, as he pulls his hand away.  " _Lady..."_   Not addressed to her.  As though there is something about the word itself, now, that puzzles him.

Arya sleeps by the nightfire, and dreams of eyes in the dark.

-

Months pass.  Freys die.

Arya likes the spark of fear in their eyes when they see Mother, see their sins come back to haunt them.  She hates it, too.

She remembers so little, too little, now, of Mother as she was _before._ The red throat and cold hands, the burning eyes, they've swallowed up the tall kind woman who told her stories and bandaged her scrapes.  A few spare months have drained the life out of eleven years, and all those things, now, they happened to someone else, some mother and daughter who weren't monsters together but were safe and warm, happy and sweet, who were probably still living somewhere, somewhere far away.

Here there are only Arya, and Mother Merciless.  The Hangwoman.  Stoneheart.  No one calls her Lady Catelyn.  Only Arya, still, calls her mother.

That other mother, that other daughter. 

Arya is not a lady.  Arya dreams of wolves.  Arya has killed, and watched as men were killed.  Arya  begged, on the riverbank, for two tired men to raise a corpse from its sleep.  Arya is a monster, now.  She knows this for a truth.   And this vengeful shade of a mother -

This is the only mother she deserves.

**Author's Note:**

> So... This was kind of going to be a standalone, but then Plot bit me, and also I felt guilty leaving Arya in that bad a place emotionally. So, marked complete, but probably more at some point.


End file.
